The low incidence of covid-19 in which the province of Alicante seems to have been for weeks is beginning to allow doctors and to gradually recover many of their face-to-face appointments that wre previously being carried out by telephone due to the virulence of the third wave.
However, the accumulation of postponed consultations and the need to update pending agendas without even a single addition to the number of personnel means that some family doctors are attending up to 90 patients a day, especially in larger health centres, or those with an older population.
Doctors consider that this figure is “unmanageable” and acknowledge that the overload they face in their day-to-day life is causing stress and anxiety for many of them.
According to María Ángeles Medina, the president of the Valencian Society of Family Medicine, “We are working at 200% and we are doing what we can, but if this situation goes on for much longer time, I don’t know how we will cope.”
This is how she assesses the situation in which health workers are attempting to return to some sort of normality in health centres, although she also states that the face-to-face consultations “have never stopped, because we have made a titanic effort to keep them going throughout the pandemic.”
But many professionals continue to reproach the Ministry of Health for not planning a de-escalation in Primary Care so that doctors are able to treat their patients in a much more appropriate way. “The workforce has not been strengthened as necessary, we have the same obsolete switchboards that we had before the pandemic, oversized quotas and unsubstituted doctors.”
She continues by saying that, in certain centres, the delays to see a family doctor skyrocket to 11, 12 or even 17 days. “People do not complain because you can often solve their problem by phone, but to wait 17 days to see a doctor is still unacceptable.”
The Ministry of Health has now said, however, that throughout the month of May the health centres will recover, at least, 80% of the face-to-face activity. “The improvement of the epidemiological situation allows us to gradually open the face-to-face appointments for medical, nursing and paediatric personnel”, said a spokesman for the department.
María Ángeles Medina continues to voice her concern stating that family doctors are seeing people with more serious pathologies and there are also more cases related to mental health: “There are patients who arrive with depression after having to close down their business, or because they have lost a relative with covid-19.
These cases cannot be dealt with in three minutes and sometimes we need 30; We need the time to be able to give them the care they deserve, but with the schedules that we are having to maintain, it is impossible”, laments the doctor.
